Aug. 21 (UPI) — Several global robotics technology leaders, including Tesla founder Elon Musk, submitted an open letter to the United Nations, imploring governments to issue ban on “lethal autonomous weapons,” also known as killer robots.

“Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend,” the letter said. “These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.”

The letter was signed by 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from 26 countries. They added: “We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close. We therefore implore the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers.”

A survey released by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) shows that more people in the U.S. use opioid painkillers than tobacco, highlighting the tragic opioid crisis gripping the country. [1]

A federal review published in the spring showed that opioid prescriptions in the U.S. decreased for the 1st time in 2 decades, which suggests that doctors are finally starting to heed warnings about the drugs’ addictive properties. However, that decrease has not translated into fewer deaths. The SAMHSA report illustrates just how widespread the problem remains.

The problem is especially severe in Tennessee, where there are more opioid prescriptions written than people actually living in the state. There are 1.18 opioid prescriptions per every resident of Tennessee. More people died from overdoses in the state in 2014 than from car crashes or shootings. [2]

Nationally, 37.8% of American adults are using some type of opioid painkiller, while 31.1% of U.S. adults use tobacco problems.

According to the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), more than 91.8 million Americans 18 and older used prescription painkillers last year. By comparison, 75.4 million U.S. adults used tobacco products. [1]

Those numbers creep even higher when children 12 and older are included; to 97.5 million and 78.3 million, respectively. And more than 12.5% of those users admitted to misusing the painkillers.

Last night’s announcement of a recommitment to the Afghanistan war is the earliest evidence that Trump has been completely castrated and will now play by status quo rules with little to no friction. This Presidency will very quickly begin to look like the fifth George W. Bush term (Obama was three and four), on every single issue of genuine importance to oligarchs.

The Damascus International Fair had been on hold for five years during the war, but kicked off earlier this week, with companies from around the world participating in the trade fair. The largest participants are expected to be from Russia and China.

While claiming this to mark the end of the war nationwide is obviously premature, it does mark a turning point in the situation around the capital city, as it’s unthinkable such an event could’ve been held in recent years, and this underscores increased security in that area.

Still, large chunks of the country remain outside of the Assad government’s control, and Shaaban vowed to see Syria’s Army confront illegitimate foreign forces present in the country, singling out US and Turkish forces in particular as objectionable presences.

The only way to systemically lower costs is to make prevention and transparency the top priorities.

As I have been noting for a decade, the broken U.S. healthcare system will bankrupt the nation all by itself. We all know the basic facts: the system delivers uneven results in terms of improving health and life expectancy while costing two or three times more per person compared to our advanced-economy global competitors.

This chart says it all: the global outlier in low life expectancy and exorbitant cost is the U.S.

Several members of the US Congress are drafting legislation that is intended to recognize certain digital currencies and protect them against interference from the federal government.

The bill, which will provide protection to cryptocurrencies that comply with certain minimum requirements to prevent them from being used by those engaged in illegal business practices like drug traffickers and terrorists, is expected to be filed in September 2017, according to DailyCaller.

Based on a reliable source, at least one Republican senator and two Republican congressmen are working on the draft legislation.

The legislators, however, have requested that should not be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue and the complexity of the proposed solution.

Hate crimes committed on social media will be treated as seriously as similar street-based offences, according to new guidelines issued by the Crown Prosecution Service as they launch a crackdown on hate speech online.

Recognising the “corrosive effect” of hate crime on British society, Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, announced the CPS will now revise prosecutions of such crimes “with the same robust and proactive approach used with offline offending”.

The changes could lead to a dramatic increase in those being prosecuted for posting prejudice attacks on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

American democracy has a problem — a voting problem. According to a new study of U.S. Census data, America has more registered voters than actual live voters. It’s a troubling fact that puts our nation’s future in peril.

The data come from Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project. The group looked at data from 2011 to 2015 produced by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, along with data from the federal Election Assistance Commission.

As reported by the National Review’s Deroy Murdock, who did some numbers-crunching of his own, “some 3.5 million more people are registered to vote in the U.S. than are alive among America’s adult citizens. Such staggering inaccuracy is an engraved invitation to voter fraud.”

Murdock counted Judicial Watch’s state-by-state tally and found that 462 U.S. counties had a registration rate exceeding 100% of all eligible voters. That’s 3.552 million people, who Murdock calls “ghost voters.” And how many people is that? There are 21 states that don’t have that many people.

Nor are these tiny, rural counties or places that don’t have the wherewithal to police their voter rolls.

California, for instance, has 11 counties with more registered voters than actual voters. Perhaps not surprisingly — it is deep-Blue State California, after all — 10 of those counties voted heavily for Hillary Clinton.

Los Angeles County, whose more than 10 million people make it the nation’s most populous county, had 12% more registered voters than live ones, some 707,475 votes. That’s a huge number of possible votes in an election.

A petition urging the Trump administration to officially label Antifa a “terror group” has more than double the 100,000 signatures needed to merit a formal response from the White House.

The left-wing “anti-fascist” group has come under fire in the wake of the violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virgnia. Many have claimed that Antifa demonstrators played a significant role in the violent clashes in Charlottesville and at other events across the country.

As of Tuesday evening, more than 250,000 people had signed the petition, which states:

Terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and intimidation in pursuit of political aims”. This definition is the same definition used to declare ISIS and other groups, as terrorist organizations. AntiFa has earned this title due to its violent actions in multiple cities and their influence in the killings of multiple police officers throughout the United States. It is time for the pentagon to be consistent in its actions – and just as they rightfully declared ISIS a terror group, they must declare AntiFa a terror group – on the grounds of principle, integrity, morality, and safety.